The Sodden, Haunted Fields of Flanders

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“Graveyard near Nieuport [Nieuwpoort] after the dikes were opened and the land flooded last winter.”CreditBelgian Official Photo, from Pictorial Press/The New York Times Mid-Week Pictorial, Aug. 30, 1917

It is a photograph that can send shivers through you on an August day, as it must have a century ago when it was published in The New York Times Mid-Week Pictorial. Taken the previous winter, it showed a graveyard near the town of Nieuwpoort after the dikes had been opened by the Belgians in an effort to stall the Germans’ advance across their country.

“The territory around the Yser Canal has been the scene of some of the most sanguinary fighting which has taken place during the three years of hostilities,” The Times said, “and it is no exaggeration to say that whole army corps have been annihilated at different times in the struggle to gain control of this little waterway and the marshy meadows on either side.” Four more pages of photos followed of the devastation in Flanders — a region whose name was immortalized in John McCrae’s poem, “In Flanders Fields.”

We are the dead; short days agoWe lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,Loved and were loved, and now we lieIn Flanders fields.

The contrast with the cover photo could scarcely have been more jarring. “Goodbye, Broadway; Hello, France!” was the headline, as if the men of the 69th Infantry Regiment of New York were off on some late-summer spree.

The changing scale of warfare was evident elsewhere in the magazine, which published a photo of the 280-foot-long Vulkan, a German “submarine mother ship,” which could tend to U-boats on either side of the hull or in the center of the vessel. Such “mother ships,” The Times said, “play an essential part in the present submarine campaign waged by Germany.”

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“The German submarine mother ship Vulcan [Vulkan], photographed in the Kiel Canal. Submarines can be seen on both sides of this ‘dock ship’ and also one entering beneath it.”CreditPhoto International Film Service/The New York Times Mid-Week Pictorial, Aug. 30, 1917

Times Insider is offering glimpses of some of the most memorable wartime illustrations that appeared in The New York Times Mid-Week Pictorial, on the 100th anniversary of each issue: